Mr Toad's Scottish adventure.

Publication: Spectator

Publication Date: 30-SEP-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)

We were somewhere around Fort William, on the edge of Loch Linnhe, when the drugs began to take hold.

That's how I wanted this article to begin. It's the sentence that formed in my head more or less immediately when the offer came through to spend a long weekend thrashing an old sports car around in the Scottish Highlands.

Instant excitement. Fear and loathing in a kilt. But this is gnat country, not bat country: lochs and lochans; bens and glens.

We didn't have any drugs stronger than Haribo sour chews. And, not having an attorney, I took a mathematician.

Nevertheless, with the top down on our Small Red Pilotfish -- a burgundy 1979 MGB -- we got, in every sense, traction.

Starting from a lifelong conviction that cars are purely for getting from one place to another alive, I turned not into Hunter S. Thompson, but Mr Toad. Late summer sunshine coming out of a clear sky, yellowish-green grass, the lochs aglitter, the engine opening its throat . . . you don't feel you're driving so much as motoring.

The car grips the road . . . it positively pulls you round the corners. Poop poop.

Before long,...

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